Greek to Me
Roberta Holland
Word Count 1590
Bad timing made me the default chauffeur for the airport run. My husband and his brother had to work the day after New Year’s so I was the designated driver for my glaucoma-ridden Greek father-in-law, picking up his mail-order bride.
They had met only once in person, introduced through his brother in Athens. A business arrangement was brokered: she would take her first-ever plane ride, her first-ever escalator ride, live in Boston with my father-in-law as his wife, and in return she would get a more comfortable though not luxurious lifestyle and eventually an apartment back in Athens.
Sitting in the plastic chairs outside customs, we scanned the crowd streaming through the doors, Theodoros craning his neck to get a better look at the legs of the lithe young flight attendants. I was pretty sure none of them were my new mother-in-law. I hoped Theodoros remembered what she looked like, but decked out in slacks and a starched dress shirt, the melanoma spots on his bald head shining in the fluorescents, he was riveted by the attractive twenty-somethings.
“Is that her?” I asked over and over again, trying to refocus him on older women as our candidates dwindled to zero.
He approached an Olympic Airlines worker manning the gate, asking in Greek if everyone was off the plane, through customs, confirming that she had in fact been on the flight. We wandered outside the terminal into the January chill and resumed scanning, a threesome near the curb catching his eye. We made our way towards an older couple speaking rapid Greek to a confused 60-year-old who had walked right by us. Clutching her old school, wheel-less suitcase and wearing brown head to toe, my new mother-in-law looked like a slightly lumpy Broom Hilda, short black hair, weathered olive skin, and an expression somewhere between a deer in the headlights and a gaping trout.
We exchanged kisses on each cheek and headed to her new home. My father-in-law and Evdokia chatted in Greek as I drove, me not saying a word due to my inability to utter more than a few stock phrases. Who the hell was this person, I thought, glancing at her in the rear-view mirror. What self-respecting woman leaves everything behind for a strange country and a strange man, who could be abusive or a total asshole. And basically for money.
I thought about the awkwardness earlier in the day preparing for this little jaunt. My harried father-in-law, rushing around his three-bedroom apartment in search of his wallet, instructing me to make up his bed.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to make up one of the other beds, in the other room,” I asked, fingering the worn bedspread.
“No, no. Just this,” unconcerned as he continued his search and made us later and later.
I swallowed my discomfort and made the full-sized bed, not even a queen. My on-demand mother-in-law would be jumping right in.
While my husband was annoyed with his father’s decision to procure a new wife a decade after his mom had died, that marriage also had been arranged. My husband told me many times that his mother had not wanted to marry his father. In their wedding picture, she looked headed to the gallows, her beautiful dark hair and smooth skin offset by a grim scowl.
“I need to stop at the Athans,” Theodoros told me, gesturing me to pull over as he darted into the Greek bakery near his apartment, leaving me and my new in-law alone in the car. She pelted me with what felt like questions though I hadn’t a clue what she was saying. No one had warned me that Evdokia spoke zero English, didn’t even know what English was. With no formal education, which was not uncommon for Greece’s poorer citizens born in the 1930s and 1940s, she knew there were other countries in the world, but didn’t understand they spoke languages other than Greek.
After a few minutes of the one-sided conversation, I muttered apologetically, “Then milau Hellenika.”
Granted, it would be confusing if someone told you they don’t speak Greek in Greek. But Evdokia kept on rambling, probably thinking I was the rudest bitch future daughter-in-law one could get. I smiled idiotically until Theodoros climbed back in, syrup dripping from the box of baklava he felt more of a necessity than, say, a separate bed.
“Can you tell her I don’t speak Greek,” I pleaded to my father-in-law.
“Ya, ya,” he said, twisting around in the seat, arms waving back and forth between me and the world in general.
Evdokia would continue speaking to me in Greek for years, and I would continue nodding idiotically.
Learning English was too tall an order for Evdokia. Illiterate in her own language, she had trouble grasping basic concepts. Plus, she didn’t need to learn. My father-in-law, whose own grasp of English was receding as he aged, only spoke Greek to her, piped in satellite television from the home country, provided her with a Greek-speaking community that included his grown sons, and got her a job in that Greek bakery.
The sensible thing, the easier thing would have been me learning Greek. A native English-speaker, I had an aptitude for foreign languages, had double majored in Spanish in college, taken French for fun. And for a couple months I tried to learn Greek with its hieroglyphics-looking alphabet and thousands of word stem endings, cramming my pregnant body into a wooden wrap-around desk for night classes at a local college. But I never progressed beyond a few basic phrases, and then kids, my job, my own aging parents got in the way.
I would listen attentively when my friends complained about their mothers-in-law, the passive aggressive comments about how tough it was to clean such a big house, how over-scheduled the kids were, the kids’ insistence on only eating beige foods.
I escaped all of this. I didn’t have any clue whether this new stepmother-in-law thought my parenting or cooking sucked. Meanwhile she didn’t have any clue I questioned her deep commitment to leopard print as she scooped up every possible iteration in greater Boston, amassing more animal print clothing and accessories than a 1970s sex worker.
Our conversations were limited to the Greek I knew: complaining about it being too hot or too cold, aided by pantomime, fanning myself or shivering depending on the season; what we would like to drink, as long as it was beer, wine, or water. And the ubiquitous how are you, how are the kids, how are your parents, how is your back all had the same answer, the only answer I knew: kala. Good. It was a nice little world where everyone and everything always had to be copacetic.
Often Evdokia would either forget I didn’t speak Greek or simply refuse to accept that reality and prattle on, far surpassing drinks and the weather. My annoyance would flare sometimes and I would respond in English with a statement about inflation rates or my grocery list. Most times I would just shake my head and try to switch to charades.
Over the years we found our way, my judgment about how she came to be in our lives softening as I gleaned bits and pieces about her former life in Greece: a childhood of extreme poverty, a much older first husband she cared for until he died, a gambling addict son back in Athens, a physically demanding life of cleaning offices. My husband and I also saw the positives she brought to my father-in-law, who was one of the kindest humans I’ve ever known: going to the old-timers’ dances with him, joining him on trips back to Greece every September, easing his loneliness.
When our kids were old enough to speak, I made sure they called her Yia-Yia to match his Papou, and never by her first name when addressing her. A respect I felt she was due, even though my husband and his brothers still missed their actual mother terribly.
My kids learned to do their own linguistic dance with her, spitting out the little Greek they knew and listening to her cackling laugh in return. Our spaniel mix didn’t mind the language difference once Evdokia started flinging pork chops and giant slabs of feta on the floor for him. The rhythms of our interactions, sometimes once a week, sometimes daily, didn’t need that many words.
The chauffeur job didn’t fall to me when it was time for Evdokia’s final return to Greece several months after my father-in-law’s death. It was clear she couldn’t manage being in the US without him, but at the same time she was not excited about going back to her little Athens apartment and grown son after spending nearly 20 years in Boston with us. There was no impromptu bakery stop on the way.
Our conversations are even tougher now, the tinny long-distance connection, the millisecond delays, her hearing loss, no visuals to aid understanding. But when the landline we keep solely for elderly relatives rings and a crazy series of numbers shows up on Caller ID, I pick up just the same, greeted by her cackle and a rapid fire torrent of Greek with the intonation spiking up at the end, letting me know I was just asked a question. And my answer, the best language lesson I ever learned coming not from a tweed-sleeved college professor but a leopard-printed illiterate mother-in-law, never varies:
Kala, Evdokia, kala.
Roberta is a freelance writer and former newspaper reporter who has covered everything from presidential inaugurations to the theft of Baby Jesus. A graduate of Grub Street’s Essay Incubator, Roberta has work published or forthcoming in Hippocampus, adoptee-voices.com, Severance Magazine, and SmokeLong Quarterly. She lives in the Boston area with her husband and two children.